HPE StoreOnce Reviews

• It has very simple architecture compared to the old HP VLS
• It also provides ease of management and is easy to configure

Each application has its own virtual library to increase the deduplication ratio.

• Dedupe algorithms
• More control from HP data protector software

We've installed three StoreOnce appliances.

Until now we did not have any problems with StoreOnce. However, have had a problem with the HP Data Protector. In order to import tapes from StoreOnce, we had to identify the ID of the items in each store on the appliances, and then create them manually on the HP Data Protector.

I would advise you that if they have a remote site, (e.g. two StoreOnce appliances) to buy the Catalyst License for faster performance, since you will have a single engine of deduplication for both sites.

So I’m not the technician, I don’t look at all the different bells and all the things it does but for me the space that it uses is a valuable feature. The compression ratio has been much better than our past solution. Our SQL database backups are getting 56:1 compression ratio and to me that’s incredible. Some of the other stuff is a little less but we’ve got an average of 25:1 and that definitely beats what we had before.

Well benefits that I’m seeing on the StoreOnce are definitely the speed to recover. I can trust the data is there. When we had the quantums in the replication it was taking up to a month, the data would be partial. I trust the data so the benefit is that the data is there. If somebody calls me and needs data recovered, I know I have it.

New features, I don’t know. I expect HP to know that stuff and they’re asking the questions and other people smarter than me know what they need. It does what I need right now. There’s nothing that I could think of that it’s missing.

I don’t like to talk about these things but so far stability on the system has been perfect, no issues. So I have two 4300’s and that came with Catalyst which was new to that platform. So when we had the systems put in the technician that came out actually hadn’t seem them before. So that was maybe the only hiccup but they did a great job installing them. I didn’t have to do anything with it and it’s been running ever since.

My impressions of scalability would be- I’ll never need to much add more space. They did a great deal with me, they doubled the space I asked for. I have enough room for years, but it also is very easily scalable. If I need to put in more trays I can.

We have not used technical support. Now HP as a whole, I have on other servers and things like that but for 3PAR I actually haven’t had to use support yet and, like I said it’s been going on two years. I’m happy with that, I’m sure if I had to call them they’d be right there.

The solution that we had for backups was Quantum for the software NetBackup. We still use NetBackup today, we like it but the quantums were aging. The maintenance agreement on the quantums were costing us a fortune and it was actually cheaper to get something new than keep the old one running. The quantums had gotten to a state where replication between them was no longer working. It would take about a month to replicate.

Hardware was starting to fail on a regular basis and we knew we needed something. We’re a primary storage with EMC so we did look at Data Domain, but I buy a lot of stuff from HP. I knew their storage was great so let’s go look at the backup solution and HP just came in with a good price, I thought it was a good product. We bought the StoreOnce, so it’s two years ago now today and you know they’re running good ever since.

It was extremely straightforward and I think this is typical for any of the vendors. I mean I don’t have all this experience but what you’re talking about is just a storage platform. It’s just disk so all they need to do is put it in, present it so that the backup can see it and that was done and it was done by the tech in just a couple of days, and we had it up and running in a week with a whole new backup catalog and it was very easy.

We did look at NetBackup, they had an appliance but it was about twice the cost. I didn’t look at Quantum because we didn’t have a lot of success with them in the past. I probably could’ve looked at them but it didn’t feel like a partnership with me with them.

With everything that I buy from HP, I just don’t feel like a customer all the time, I kind of feel like a partner, and at Shields Health Care we like to collaborate and partner with people.

And it’s tough to say, what I wanted to look at was the data has to be accurate. And so if we’re backing up patient data, it’s critical. I mean everybody says their data is critical, in healthcare it’s critical. If I need to restore something I need to know it’s there, I need to know where it is, I need to know I can get it fast.

With the quantums we also had a tape solution in place and those tapes were offsite, sometimes it would take a couple of days to get the data back. So what the StoreOnce allowed us to do was to also get off a tape, which was important to me. I don’t trust tape, a lot of people do. With StoreOnce, I know this data is there and I can get it quickly. The speed that we can recover files now is incredible. Even if it’s something small it’s not critical. Say a user loses an email and we backed it up the night before, you can get that email back in seconds. It used to take us a long time.

We’d restore the entire mail store. You’re looking at the entire afternoon just to get some files back. We’re happy and with this upgrade we also upgraded NetBackup. So it’s not to say that the stuff that we had before wasn’t capable, it was time to get a new solution.

I did a panel this week on going into backup solutions. One customer was still using tape, recommendations for them was to go to StoreOnce. For me the maintenance has been cheaper, the implementation was easy, it's small product that doesn’t take up much space in my data center, and it’s been reliable and out-performed what I had used previously.

Peer reviews, anytime I pick up any new solution I like to know that a customer has already done, so I did reach out and talk to other folks that had been in the same situation. It’s tough to get the same exact situation but they had me call a couple hospitals in Boston. They all had great experiences, same ease of deployment that I saw, so those are very important to me. I like to know that someone else has done the same thing and had some results.

Some of the valuable features are that we’re able to regain ROI off of our tier one environment, so we’re able to take archive data, legacy data, put that on, give it retention tagging, and retention timelines, and then it’ll be able to be purged at a later date. Instead of using up our Tier 1 storage, which is about a $1.45 a gigabyte, we’re able to leverage tier two storage with dedupe and compression, at 35 - 45 cents a gigabyte, so that to us just made sense.

In terms of benefits that we’re seeing, we’re definitely seeing improved backup times. We went from two and a half hours to four hours for backups -- down to under ten minutes. So, the amount of recouped administration time that we’re gaining is astronomical. From a stability perspective I think StoreOnce has definitely been extremely stable for us.

We didn’t really have a D-R-D-P solution and I think it really compliments our blade environment in taking a lot of the data that we have around the organization that’s legacy, and looking at that, looking at last touched date, things of that nature, we’re able to really leverage archiving now, and that’s something we weren’t able to do before, because we were keeping all of our backups in our Tier 1 storage. We really didn’t have a location to have an enterprise data recovery, and data protection strategy and now we do.

In terms of the way that we feel, or the way that I feel about StoreOnce, I think it definitely provided us with the opportunity to give the business something it never had before, and that is a true guarantee to the data that we have. So we’re able to really protect and fortify our archive data, instead of not being able to restore in times when we actually need to have the data available.

From a feature functionality perspective I think overall having some more mobility tied into it, having the ability to have applications that you can use on the go, that can give you kind of an overlay of the overall health and welfare of your data protection and data recovery strategy, being able to do simple things, like having run books. I think those are some of the things that we definitely want to get into. I’d like to see that develop a lot more.

From a scalability perspective, some of the things that are intriguing to me are we have the ability to scale as the business needs and we can also contract, so we can be fluid. We can move when the business needs us to move, we can back up, we can make sure that we have all the pertinent data that the organization needs, and also have the ability to restore it quickly, and not tie up production systems and production storage while doing that.

I think HP, by far has some of the best technical support I’ve ever encountered. I was just telling a story in regards to how we started doing business with HP. HP came out and serviced us, and we weren’t even under contract. The same day, same night, and made sure our organization was whole come the next day, and for an eight billion dollar company that really resonated with us. That was the precursor to our decision to move forward with HP and we’ve been really happy ever since.

In looking at criteria from a tier two storage perspective in terms of data protection and data recovery, I think cost was definitely one of the factors that we looked at. We looked at response time, we looked at integration ability, and I think coupling that with the environment that we had, we’re a 98 percent virtualized organization, from a virtual server perspective, and I think tying that in to our already HP environment, really weighed on the decision for us to move in the StoreOnce direction.

From a solutions perspective, in terms of what we’re doing from data protection and data recovery, we knew that we needed to have a tier two solution in terms of storage. We looked at many different avenues within the market, and we really felt that from an ROI perspective and a total cost of ownership perspective, that HP StoreOnce was really the way we needed to go, so we built our data protection and data recovery strategy around that using HP and Veeam. That actually helped us to build RTOs, RPOs, and real SLAs and OLAs from a restoration perspective to the business.

There were other vendors on the short list, and to be completely honest, they paled in comparison. We were actually considering an EMC product, DataDomain, and Exagrid and they just didn’t have the compute power or the price point that we really wanted to be in, so we just leveraged the HP relationship that we already had and went complete StoreOnce, and we’ve been extremely happy with it so far.

Researching advice I’d give to my peers: I would definitely say do your homework. Do a true comparison between everybody in the market. That way you will actually be able to see the benefit that HP provides at the cost point, at the total cost of ownership, ROI, and also from a performance perspective as well. Depending on who you’re using from a backup solution perspective, StoreOnce, is gonna work with anyone.

Getting a full understanding of who the players are in the market, you’re gonna see that HP is definitely a major player in that space. Really understand your business, really understand what your strategic goals are, really understand where you’re going from an organizational perspective. That will give you insight into how you build your data protection and data recovery strategy. Some of the things that we did were we sat down with operations, we sat down with legal, we sat down with finance, and we defined what that was as an organization before we ever started looking, so definitely do your homework. Make sure you understand where your business is going before you go get a solution

In researching solutions I think peer reviews are definitely important. I think knowing for yourself is also important, but definitely do your research, definitely listen to what the market is saying, and above all else, go see it for yourself. Take a demo, look at it, look at what they’re saying, help them prove it to you, really understand what your requirements are and how the solution maps back to your requirements. It’s really all about that. If it’s a map, and it maps back, you got to be able to prove what in the solution maps back to what your requirement is.

Leveraging data from your peers is definitely important, but making sure that you truly understand what your requirements are, and what in the solution maps back to your requirements is key for success.

• Industry-leading backup
• Deduplication technology
• Efficient backup
• Disaster recovery operations
• It's very valuable for virtual backup

Excellent and seamless virtual and physical backup. If given the opportunity, it also helps with product development.

It needs to be more versatile to run our tests smoothly.

I've used it for one year.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It's 10/10.

It's 10/10.

It's 10/10.

We previously used QNAP, and it just wasn't enough for our needs.

It was simple to setup.

It's 10/10.

Daily onsite backup, rapid data restore and reliable off site disaster recovery. HP deduplication technology can reduce the amount of backup data you need to store by up to 95 per cent and can deliver backup speeds of up to 100TB/hr.

• It’s less mechanical so it’s writing to hard drives and we’ve had no problems with it whatsoever during the year we’ve been using it. It’s saved us so much time as well because we don’t have to troubleshoot the migrations every day. We know that those migrations are going to happen and that’s taken a weight off a lot of peoples’ minds, particularly those running our out of hours services.
• We were creating so much data that even with two huge libraries and over 100 tapes, it only had the capacity to keep backups for three weeks. With deduplication on the virtual tape library it’s now achieving a compression ratio of 16:1 which means it can keep the backups for six months.
• Deduplication also reduces the number of disks required which reduces space, energy and cooling costs.
• Since the staged back-up happens in the background there is no impact on the network so back-up times are not an issue. However, even with the added work of deduplication, StoreOnce is delivering a transfer rate of up to 7GB/min.

Since the staged back-up happens in the background there is no impact on the network.

Came with two additional enclosures to put the drives in and you can add another one. We ordered the additional enclosure, it arrived, we racked it up, connected it into the VTL and ran a command to say ‘recognise this enclosure - expand to this enclosure’ and it just did it. You don’t lose anything because the data that is on the existing enclosures just spreads out across the new enclosure.

HP offered as much or as little support as we required so we did the implementation ourselves. It was checked over by an HP engineer and signed off in two weeks. HP provides support with a nine to five next business day callout. HP comes to visit us and we have conference calls, presentations and demonstrations. That is the kind of interaction we’re getting.

HP provided a Webinar overview of the virtual tape library, gave us access to HP Labs and also sent in two technical specialists to talk through the product, demonstrate it and answer all our questions. However, what swung the deal for us was that we were able to have the kit on loan for up to three months. If you don’t like it HP come and remove the kit. If you do like it you just pay for it and keep it. That was brilliant because I didn’t want to go through the process of buying something and then find it didn’t operate in the way we wanted or was incompatible with certain backup software.

Our storage infrastructure was founded on an HP StorageWorks EVA 4400 disk array and when demand increased, a further EVA 6550 array was added.

It integrates very well with our backup software. Creating a new VTL is very easy. You just go into the system and create the new library saying what kind of emulation you want, how many drives and how many tape cartridges and it creates it. It has a whole range of emulation types and most backup software will support one of the emulations that StoreOnce will use.

We did the implementation ourselves.

We have not so far computed the amount of money saved but efficiency and service standards have certainly increased. Previously, if someone lost a file it could take 10 minutes to locate and load the appropriate tape. Now, the restore time is around five seconds.

It performs pretty well with minimal to no issues.

It has allowed us greater storage with a reduced footprint. It also works well with our servers – including our Dell servers. It was important that we have an integrated environment.

We had some initial driver issues, but I think the newer release has changed all that. The one issue I have is the maintenance package – it's very expensive. If I were to renew it, it would remain expensive and not cost effective. The initial proposal was inconsistent with what I found in terms of maintenance and renewal costs. A break/fix-type package would be better.

I've used it for four years.

It is pretty stable; excellent, in fact. I had one very minimal hard-drive failure.

We recently added more and it went very well. It's easy to add to this product.

8/10 for both. Issues were dealt with quickly and efficiently.

We were previously using a different solution but our storage needs grew and we decided we needed a new solution.

It was straightforward.

We had an HP engineer come in for implementation. He was excellent.

Dell and IBM. We chose HP because of the price and the vendor support.

The two things that we looked at were performance and cost.

This particular product is stable, and the support has been good. If you want a reliable and reasonably-priced product, I would recommend it.

• Redundancy
• Ease of use
• Scalability
• Disaster recovery

The greatest benefit to us has been lowering costs.

I'd like to see the following features added in:

• More detailed reporting
• More granular reporting
• More features in the CLI

Excellent.

Excellent.

Excellent. There has been an integrated partnership with the ability to answer any and all questions.

We were using a different solution, but it was too costly so we needed to switch.

The initial setup was straightforward. HP took a hands-off approach, which was good, and they let us do a lot of it on our own. We therefore didn’t have to do cross-training and we were able to do a lot of trial and error, which was good for us as well.

We also looked at EMC.

Most important criteria to look for includes:

• Price
• Features
• Functionality
• Ease of use

Definitely look at this solution as a viable option as it is cost effective and reliable.